Pages

Thursday, September 26, 2013

They're cute, beach cruiser style, with teeny tiny blinking lights. Most of the riders are tourists. Most of the riders are rising on the sidewalk, oblivious to pedestrians scrambling to get out of their way. Most of the riders are helmetless.

Our alderman 46th ward James Cappelman is a huge supporter of Divvy. He calls it ride sharing. Of course it appears that way=$7 for a 24-hour Divvy pass.Except FIRST you have to pay $75 for a membership. Those tourists thinking they're getting a deal, get a credit card shock. That is if they still have their brains in tact. I see so many people on these bikes, all without helmets. Isn't it a city ordinance to ride with a helmet.

Next question regarding the Divvy program in Chicago--the bike stands are on city sidewalks. Do they rent the sidewalk? Does Chicago get a kickback or portion of profits?

It’s
quite surprising that poor revenues roughly equivalent to 7 percent of
first-year costs during summertime’s peak ridership months translates to
performance “beyond expectations.” If this is considered good
performance, just how low were expectations to begin with? Perhaps the
rosy comments from City Hall are more about political spin than hard
facts.

snip*** end

Don't get me wrong--I LOVE bikes and the whole idea of bike sharing is just so great. If it was actually a local bike shop or program that hired real people to help the renters get a good fit and quick over view of bike safety and also fitted the customer with a helmet. Make the helmet part of the package. Instead tourists are jumping on for what they think is a quick, cheap ride without real lights and without any head protection.

Divvy bikes are not helping the local economy or local cyclists.

On the other hand it makes Chicago and its politicians feel good about being green--green like money in their pocket.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Question from a 4th grade history quiz: Why did Washington cross the Delaware?

Answer I filled in the blank with: To get to the other side.

I was terrible at history. I could not tell a Roman Republic
from a Roman Empire—apparently this is very
important and, yes, I flunked this quiz also.

Yet I was able to imagine history. Not like an abstract timeline,
but the story in history.

I could close my eyes and see the cave-dark origins of the
Neanderthal, see the women walking on the prairie behind wagons into canyons of
deep unknown. I saw the Little House on the Prairie! I played with Laura and
Mary—and prayed with them when Jack their dog went missing. I was with
Hemingway in the Italian Alps fighting and falling in love, over and over
again, in Paris and Pamplona,
Cuba and Key West.

I can tell you stories. Right now I’m working on a revision
of a YA historical novel where I’m trying to make it as authentic as possible.

Hang in there with me as I’ve been slow these past months on
posting at the blog.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Even the use of 9/11 is short-hand, a way to immediately
conjure up an image with the reader. No matter if you were alive then or just
born, now, 12 years later, one can easily have a memory or, at the very least, a
working collective memory of what happened that day.

It is engraved on the conscience of the 21st century.

Much of my work has been with flash memoir. I’m sure the
memory of what happened that day has shifted down through the past decade plus.
From my book Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir I talk about the Challenger study.
snip--

The day after
the Challenger disaster Emory
University professor
Ulric Neisser asked his students to write down their feelings. I’m sure this
was cathartic for them. But also, interestingly enough, before they graduated a
few years later he asked them to again write personal essays about the
Challenger disaster, specifically about what they remembered about that day.

He found three
things. First, the memories of the students had dramatically changed:
“twenty-five percent of the students’ subsequent accounts were strikingly
different from their original journal entries. More than half the people had
lesser degrees of error, and less than ten percent had all the details
correct.” Second, people were usually confident that the accounts they provided
two and a half years later were accurate. And third, “when confronted with
their original reports, rather than suddenly realizing that they had
misremembered, they often persisted in believing their current memory.”

snip--

Nevertheless, 9/11 was an event that affected all of us—globally
and locally, politically—even today, echoes of 9/11 and its repercussions are
sounding throughout the halls at Capitol Hill. We’re living with the continued legacy
of that day.

Yesterday, 9/10—a day by the way that has little impact upon
my memory—I was thinking “Oh I hope they don’t do all that cheesy news stuff
tomorrow. I hate how it’s become simply a news event, sort of like how
the March on Washington a couple of weeks ago got a bit-overdone. It was
significant and a turning point, but that message gets subliminated by the
glitz, the logos, and other graphics the media uses to “brand.” There is a big
difference between the oral tradition of telling a story and advertising a
story.

Yet today I was totally conscious of the date as I crossed
the street to my new office. This would be the first day after taking a couple
weeks to move that I would come over and sit at my desk and my computer in a new
space. For over three years I’d been moved out while the building was
re-habbed. In the middle of the street I remembered: This is where I was when I
heard the news. A plane has hit the World
Trade Towers.

My husband on the morning of 9/11 met me half way and said
let’s go watch TV. Are you crazy? I remember thinking, It’s only 9:30 a.m.; we've
got to go to work. But I followed him and in the lobby of my building, a friend
stopped us and said, Come watch TV with me. Again peculiar, so we followed and
in a room already filled with people we watched. The horror. The awfulness. The
unaffected images of what would turn out to be life-changing.

At that moment, as we watched, the pictures had not been re-shaped or re-framed by time and news outlets.

Now all we have is what our memories tell us, and how the
event is portrayed on TV.

A powerful image from that day has now worked itself into
our American Myth or the mythology surrounding that day. (Please do not confuse
myth with conspiracy theories—omg—just reading YouTube comments is enough to
make me want to resign from the human race and eject myself from planet Earth.)
But myth in the sense of stories we tell ourself that get repeated over and
over. That image is Falling
Man.

There is an interesting YouTube video about this subject and
about the iconic image that I imagine Susan Sontag—were she here today—would comment
on (and not like the crazos commenting on the various YouTube sites etc on the
subject of 9/11).

Falling Man is about re-framing memory, about
self-censorship, about how we choose
to remember.

It is a powerful video. After seeing the AP photo dozens and dozens of times by the end of the film, you realize that the image is no longer shocking, controversial--it has been stripped of pre-conceptions--and given, in return, some humanity.

By the end of the film one realizes how the mind and our emotions play with memory, re-shaping and re-framing. And, because we are only human, susceptible to all our frailties, we're all fallen.

Monday, September 2, 2013

If you haven't come out of your Rip Van Winkle cave, then you probably heard that last week marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

I Have a Dream

I recently saw a documentary on King's progression as a social activist from Selma to Memphis. No matter the issue, he said he wanted to be on the side of justice. Thus he fought not only for voting rights, but for fair housing and jobs for minorities. This is something I think society is still struggling with. Especially in my neighborhood, where every day the poor and low-income earners are being squeezed out of housing. Just this past month another SRO (sing-room occupancy) building got gobbled up by a developer, planning a 14M re-hab on the Lawrence House, once housing for seniors and others on fixed incomes.

Martin Luther King's life and death demonstrates a life not only on the right side of an issue, but one who sacrifices and pursues with a passion a commitment to that issue.

I find many people who say they are progressive (code for not prejudice), who say they identify with those struggling for civil rights, who love diversity.

But this past week I heard something that I hope is simply an ugly rumor.

On the first day of school, by the "known" troublespots in Uptown, where in the past there has been outbreaks of violence, the police randomly rounded up residents hanging out at those corners and moved them to the Jewel store parking lot and kept them there until the parents and children along the back-to-school route had vacated the sidewalks.

Really?

I heard it was an effort to rid the streets of the homeless who gather around the McDonald's at Wilson and Sheridan. Who decides who is homeless? Who decides who is a bum? And, lastly, what does this have to do with the gang violence--they are 2 separate issues.

I Have a Dream--that housing will become a human right. That the marginalized will not be reduced to the point of invisibility. That in Uptown we can all DWELL together in unity. not according to class and square feet.

Fantastic Resource!

NEW!!! e-book edition

eBook Edition Has bonus Material

Twitter

Followers

Quick Bio

Jane Hertenstein is the author of Home is Where We Live: Life at a Shelter Through a Young Girl’s Eyes (picture book), Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (with Marie James), and Beyond Paradise (YA fiction). See BOOKS
She has taught mini courses in memoir at the university level as well as seminars at Cornerstone Festival, Prairie School of Writing. Jane is listed on the Illinois Artists Roster. Roster Artists are certified by the Illinois Arts Council to work in public schools introducing young people to the arts. She lives in Chicago where she facilitates a “happening” critique group.